Network Diagramming Channel Feature

Network Diagramming Vendor OPNET Provides Major APM Gains to the Air Transport Industry

By Beecher Tuttle
TMCnet Contributor

It's difficult to overstate the importance of networked applications for the air transport industry. From pricing and selling tickets to managing the logistics of shipping packages, passenger and cargo airlines need to ensure the viability of a number of critical automated processes.

The air transport industry's unique reliance on networked applications puts airlines in jeopardy of suffering severe consequences if they fail to adequately manage the performance of their applications and all associated components.

If applications go down or become chronically slow, airlines and even entire airports are faced with the possibility of losing customers and money. For this reason, the majority of forward-thinking air transport organizations are embracing application performance management (APM (News - Alert)) solutions that can help eliminate outages and resolve problems with limited human intervention.

Network diagramming specialist OPNET is one of the leading providers in the APM space. Under a new partnership with global air transport IT solutions vendor SITA, OPNET recently implemented a new APM platform at a tier one U.S. airport that services north of 50 million passengers each year.

The deployment began back in 2010 after the airport recognized an uptick in their number of application performance incidents, due mainly to an increase in their user base and number of applications utilized. Simply put, their current toolset was unable to keep pace with their growth, leading directly to outages, response delays and disruptions of airport services, according to a recent case study.

"Senior engineers from the network, infrastructure, and database teams often found themselves troubleshooting the same problems in parallel, wasting significant time, and not always finding the true causes of complicated issues," says OPNET. "They decided to work together to find a more automated way of troubleshooting -- one that progresses efficiently from the end-user’s view of performance to the root causes of problems."

After combing the market for capable solutions, the tier one airport selected OPNET’s APM Xpert suite. The results have been extraordinary. The airport gained immediate visibility over the performance of their applications across a number of different tiers.

The airport IT team utilizes the OPNET APM platform to monitor all of their public and internal datacenter applications. The system provides them with access to the granular information necessary to fix problems, help them to make better and faster decisions and reduce repair times.

In addition, the OPNET APM platform provides details on whether the end user experience issues are due to application or network problems. The solution even enables IT personnel to identify problems before customers call the help desk, improving response times and, in turn, customer satisfaction.

Supplementary benefits include the ability to reduce the IT personnel needed to solve network problems and provide unique information on where network upgrades are required.

Click here to download the complete case study.